number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

David Brooks

articles

FREDERICK Law Olmsted, who spent much of his life de- signing places where people could find refuge, never seemed to find refuge for himself. He never settled down and built a private estate where he could retire and retreat from the pressures of the world. Instead, he traveled and worked ceaselessly. In 1894, at age 69, he wrote the following in a letter to his stepson John about his schedule for the coming months.

ON the second day of the battle of Gettysburg, three Confederate brigades launched an attack on a gap in the Union line on Cemetary Ridge. Union General Winfield Scott Hancock rode up to the spot and saw to his horror that the Southern soldiers would be able to pour right through and flood into the Union rear. He called upon the only Northern regiment at hand, the First Minnesota, to fill the soft spot in the line and hold off the enemy troops until more substantial reinforcements could be put in place. Hancock shouted over to the Minnesota commander William Colvill, and motioned to the Alabama flag advancing at the head of the Confederate force, “Colonel, do you see those colors? Take them.”

I STILL remember the shocked expression on the face of the rabbi who performed my wife’s conversion. We were sitting on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and this nice liberal rabbi asked what being Jewish meant to me. I threw out the first thing that came to mind, a series of names: Kristol, Podhoretz, Trilling, Bellow—a bunch of Jewish intellectuals around Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Public Interest. The poor rabbi was appalled. He’d prepared my wife for her conversion ritual bath and now here she was potentially emerging from the mikvah straight into a meeting of the Committee for the Free World.

RECENTLY, I took part in a series of auditions for a .television talk show. I’m a conservative white male so I was put on a panel with a black male liberal and a white Jewish feminist. On the next panel, there was a blond feminist, a white male centrist, and a liberal Catholic priest. Another panel had a conservative thrown in with a gay male and a black woman cartoonist. Filing in for subsequent auditions, I saw a rabbi and a Hispanic man, and, if you had hung around for the whole series, no doubt you would have seen a pro-life Eskimo, a Perot-minded Asian American, and probably a lesbian with an interest in financial-services reform.

IS there anything more boring than the debate about political .correctness? As if the trinity of race, class, and gender hadn’t become tedious enough, now denouncing political correctness has become encrusted with its own clichés. At the moment, a cable-TV show, a book, and a Broadway production carry the title Politically Incorrect and seem to applaud themselves for their supposed courage. The whole thing hit the point of absurdity when, on a late-night talk show, the actress Whoopi Goldberg announced that she detested political correctness. It was all one could do not to hurl something at the television and shout: “Ms. Goldberg, you are political correctness.”